Dublin ranks 26th in quality of city life survey

DUBLIN RANKS as the 26th best city in the world for quality of living in a list of 221 cities rated in a business survey. The capital remains in the same place as last year, down from 25th place in 2009.

In a related list, Dublin ranks as the 16th best city for personal safety, immediately ahead of Amsterdam.

Consultancy group Mercer’s 2011 Quality of Living survey published yesterday ranks the Austrian capital Vienna as the city with the best living standard in the world.

Baghdad ranks last, both for quality of life and personal safety. Zurich and Auckland are in second and third place in the standard of living rankings. Munich is in fourth place, followed by Düsseldorf and Vancouver sharing fifth.

Another German city, Frankfurt, ranks seventh for quality of life, followed by Geneva in eighth place. Copenhagen and Bern share ninth place.

More than half of the cities in the top 25 are European cities.

In the personal safety rankings, which are based on internal stability, crime levels, law enforcement effectiveness and international relations, Luxembourg comes out on top. It is followed by Bern, Helsinki and Zurich, all sharing second place. Vienna ranks fifth, while Geneva and Stockholm both rank sixth.

Baghdad is considered the world’s least safe city of the 221 examined, followed by N’Djamena in Chad, Abidjan in Côte d’Ivoire, Bangui in the Central African Republic and Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of the Congo.

Aberdeen and Glasgow are both at 44 and are the highest UK cities on the personal safety list, Mercer said. Birmingham (53) and Belfast (63) both rank higher than London (68).

Senior researcher at Mercer, Slagin Parakatil, said European cities in general continued to have high standards of living “but economic turmoil, high levels of unemployment and lack of confidence in political institutions make their future positions hard to predict”.

The consultancy group evaluates local living conditions in all of the 420 cities it surveys worldwide. Conditions are analysed according to 39 factors in 10 categories.

These include the political and social environment, the economic environment, the socio-cultural environment, health and sanitation, recreation, housing, public services, and schools and education.

Mercer said the data was largely collected between September and November of this year.